Allen-Bradley "blue hose"

I need a short piece of cable to hook up a test Panelmate to an old PLC-5 system. I do not have any of the A-B "blue hose" (Belden 9463) to make the connection.
Would any 2 conductor shielded cable work as this is just temporary set up?
I will be hooking into a live production process.

As a temporary setup, it should be fine.

Ideally, you'd get a shielded twisted pair with about 78 ohm impedance.

But in practice, RIO/DH+ will run on nearly any pair of conductors. At Automation Fair 1997 we literally ran it on a section of barbed wire fence.

If you've got a shielded twisted pair of about 10 feet length, go ahead and splice it in.

Murphy's law...
We are downsizing our office space and had to clear out 3 storage rooms full of old stuff. Sent a perfectly good reel of blue hose off to the recyclers... I wanted to post a message on here and other forums, the boss man didn't want to wait even one day.

Going against the grain

Jim G. said:

I need a short piece of cable to hook up a test Panelmate to an old PLC-5 system. I do not have any of the A-B "blue hose" (Belden 9463) to make the connection.
Would any 2 conductor shielded cable work as this is just temporary set up?
I will be hooking into a live production process.

Click to expand...

I used to work for an Allen Bradley Distributor and an AB integrator,

There is nothing magical about 9463 belden blue hose.

I have seen category 5 network cable used in its place for short runs to a panelview, Shielded and unshielded. As long as you do not introduce noise into your system you probably won't have a problem. For what you want to do. and you probably won't need to terminate it with a 150ohm resiter either for your purpuse

You could grab a piece of 2 conductor lamp cord for what you want to do. Anybody says you HAVE to use blue hose never tried anything else. I have 100' run of remote I/o using Cat 5 ethernet unshielded in an office environment as a temp solution running right now - no problems No Terminators..

Now having said that- Use Blue hose for your final install. If you don't, the first thing any AB Support people will tell you to do is change if you have a comm problem even if it isn't the issue.

Caspian

off topic

DH+/RIO is very robust.

An engineer I worked with in a previous life told a story. This story seems impossible but this guy was not known to make stuff up.

He was troubleshooting intermittent DH+ communications on a machine with a PanelMate as the HMI. It would stop working occasionally.

The blue hose was routed through wireways with motor leads and every conceivable type of control voltage. He traced the DH+ cable from the PLC and found it was landed on some terminal blocks and the shield was very frayed. He went to clean up the terminations and got shocked. He broke out a meter and found that there was 120vac to ground on one of the DH+ wires. Apparently the adjacent terminal block was "L1" and a "whisker" was connecting that terminal to the DH+ terminal.

He fixed that problem and the errors went away. No damage done. It worked about 80% of the time with 120vac riding on it!

I still try to only use the "special" cable and NO TERMINAL BLOCKS because downtime and intermittent problems are usually more expensive than high dollar cable.

I have it running over a mile over buried telco bundle.